Attitude and behavior are two aspects of personality that often go hand-in-hand. When one's attitude is favorable, they are more likely to take chances, seek opportunities, and take risks. Conversely, their behavior will indicate their mood of either acceptance or rejection. It may be hard to know what your own personal attitude and behavior are, but the answers to these questions can help you understand yourself. It also helps you learn how to manage it.
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Attitude refers to our initial emotional state prior to acting or trying something. Attitude and behavior are then strongly influenced by our beliefs, thoughts, and emotions. Attitude is basically a subjective feeling, opinion, or judgment of approval or rejection toward something. Behavior is either an immediate response or a repetitive action that takes place in response to particular stimuli (i.e, thought or action). Individuals hold complex emotional relationships between attitude and behavior, which are further compounded by the various social influences influencing both.

A new theory in social marketing psychology suggests that attitudes can help explain both why people do what they do and why they fail at it. Specifically, it explains that people who are operating from strong social marketing beliefs, feelings, and behaviors will be much more successful than those operating from weaker or mixed emotions. This is because strong attitudes promote cooperation, trust, and motivation while conflicting behaviors produce withdrawal, competition, and resistance. In addition, attitudes also predict how we remember and process information.

Our attitudes, however, can also get in the way of our behavior. The current model of this phenomenon is called "cognitive dissonance." This is described as the tendency for our positive (confidence), positive, and negative (anti-confidence) behaviors to be conflicting so that we end up doing only one or the other (either positive or negative). For example, a salesperson may believe that he is selling the best product in the market when, in reality, he is breaking the law by keeping customers on the phone long after they have made their purchase. However, by adopting a powerful and positive attitude, the salesperson would then be able to convince his customers that he is acting in the best way possible to satisfy the customers' needs.

The current model explains how attitudes, feelings, and thoughts can get in the way of our actions and our ability to effectively carry them out. According to the model, it's not just the case that your emotions or feelings get in the way, but that in most cases your actions are the result of your state of mind rather than your emotions. To take another example, think about how you feel if you hate someone or something. The state of mind you are in will either cause you to act differently or not act at all.

The model further explains that these two types of behavior are the result of the interaction of your attitudes with both the external and internal social norms. In essence, your attitude towards other people and their behavior is the starting point of the chain. Once this chain has been started, the result is either you break the chain or your behavior being the expected result.

In today's society, our emphasis is on being motivated. We want to be successful and we work very hard to achieve our goals. However, according to the Attitude and Behavior model, most of our behaviors are the result of our initial attitude towards the people or things around us. A new system that is being developed by the University of Cincinnati in order to help people change their attitudes and consequently their behaviors, believes that a better way is to apply changes to the individual, rather than the systems that we already have in place.
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The Attitude and Behavior system believes that a positive, proactive outlook is the key to changing attitudes and consequently their behavior. In order to change behaviors and their attitudes, it is necessary to identify the sources of dissonance. According to this perspective, attitudes are the result of specific behaviors which are then combined with beliefs, and values. The challenge for this approach is that many of our behaviors are the result of our attitudes towards other people or things around us. For example, our treatment of other people and the way in which we treat our possessions can all be part of our attitudes and thus will contribute to a negative or positive attitude.